Is 8 hours a night right for everyone?

HOWEVER you do it - alone, with a partner, on your back, side or front, in the dark or with the light on - bedding down for a night's sleep feels like one of the most personal things we do. According to anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer, this is just an illusion.

In The Slumbering Masses, Wolf-Meyer argues that US sleep habits are not individual, or even largely biological. They are, instead, cultural, designed to fit the schedule of a capitalist society. Ever since industrialisation, eight consolidated hours of sleep each night has been touted as optimal.

Yet sleep can be a notoriously difficult state to achieve, so remedies have emerged for those who struggle to fit in with the culture of sleep that meets the demands of the workplace. There are pills for insomniacs, for example, and caffeine to repress the desires of the sleep-deprived during the day. These help people to work and sleep during the appropriate hours, regardless of what best suits the individual.

The first part of this book is a heavy-going introduction to this thesis, but the sections detailing sleep disorders are more compelling. Wolf-Meyer opens our eyes to fatal familial insomnia - a fascinating and horrific untreatable condition. Once symptoms set in, a persistent inability to sleep leads to death in a relatively short time.

Even for the more familiar sleep disorders, from insomnia to narcolepsy and sleep apnea, the choices for treatment are minimal: turn to medication or live out of sync with the rest of society.

An alternative to medication would be to modify the status quo. In later chapters Wolf-Meyer details some of the so-far unsuccessful attempts to do so, from promoting work-time napping to introducing later-starting school days for teenagers. These parts will leave you reconsidering your own relationship with sleep, and questioning how it could be improved.

The call for a more accepting and individualistic approach to the social construct of sleep is a noble one. So it's a shame the academic style in which Wolf-Meyer lays out his argument is far from stimulating. Perhaps heeding our body's desire for sleep, rather than societal norms, could help us all. Unfortunately for the author, if readers espouse that philosophy, they may not make it to the end of the book.

The links between trade, disease and economic warfare

David Cohen, contributor

ANYONE who has travelled through an airport has surely noticed the rather long list of items that are prohibited on board a plane. But along with the more understandably forbidden articles, such as guns, knives, grenades and canisters of petrol, there is often a list of seemingly innocuous cargo: fresh foodstuffs. In Australia, even muddy shoes are frowned upon. It may seem a bit excessive, but these prohibitions are the climax of a long historical trend and are motivated, as Mark Harrison reveals in Contagion, by a mixture of public-health, food-safety and protectionist trading policies.

Harrison's erudite study of the impact of global commerce and travel on the spread of disease charts how the responses of governments and traders to outbreaks evolved, from the Black Death some 650 years ago, to the recent outbreaks of SARS and avian flu. As Australia's muddy-shoe ban intimates, disease vectors are a serious concern. Viruses and bacteria that travel in soil or food can have a disastrous impact on crops and livestock, and the spread of human diseases such as yellow fever and malaria can be devastating for public health. A particularly deadly strain of malaria was exported from Africa to the rest of the world by the slave trade, for example.

It was as a consequence of the Black Death that "quarantine" came into vogue as the preferred means of disease control. Simultaneously it became a potent weapon of economic warfare. Harrison goes to great pains to point out that throughout history, governments have needed little encouragement to adopt quarantine and import bans as weapons of foreign policy and economic advantage, often with tragic consequences for the "victim" states where the infections originated.

Contagion is a thorough, well-researched and thoughtful tome, and Harrison includes some interesting asides about the history of medicine. But be warned, his writing style is academic in nature and dry in tone. Not as infectious as one might have hoped.

The sad disappearance of Antarctica

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

ANTARCTICA won't be here for much longer. So says ecologist James McClintock, who has visited the continent many times over the past 30 years. In Lost Antarctica, he combines the latest research with anecdotes of his time there.

McClintock's excellent survey of the state of Antarctica moves nimbly from the break-up of the sea ice to the invasion of king crabs and the gradual disappearance of Adélie penguins. The loss of Arctic sea ice has gained more headlines recently, but he makes a good case that the changes to the Antarctic could ultimately be more profound.

The book sometimes descends into clunky and technical prose, but it always picks up with a wild story - divers being hunted by a peckish leopard seal, for example - and McClintock's passion for the harsh Antarctic environment shines through.

Liberating cyberspace

Samantha Murphy, contributor

THE greatest threat to US security, according to the country's defence staff, will probably never be mentioned during a presidential campaign debate. It is not suicide bombers or illegal immigrants: it is the underground network of hacktivists and information vigilantes.

In This Machine Kills Secrets, Andy Greenberg gives us a fairly thorough bird's-eye view of the history and power of the cypherpunk and hacktivist movements. He capitalises on his unrivalled access to many of the key players, including those Wikileaks poster boys, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. His focus, though, is on the questions that Wikileaks poses for society: who owns information, and should it be free?

While lawmakers and law enforcers struggle with the philosophy and practicality of these issues, the people Greenberg profiles have made up their minds, and they are a few steps ahead. If you're wondering who they are and why they feel so strongly, look no further than this book.